


Awakenings

by thedevilchicken



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Background Het, Drift Compatibility, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 07:02:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4170501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve wakes to a world terrorised by kaiju and steps up to pilot a jaeger. Natasha assists.</p>
<p>Bucky wakes as the Winter Soldier and struggles to find a new identity. Steve is entirely unhelpful.</p>
<p>And while Steve comes to terms, someone else saves the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Awakenings

“Let’s be practical about this,” Natasha said, her tone so painfully reasonable that it actually made Steve wince.

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“And you’re verging on delusional.”

Steve set his jaw and looked away, out the open door of Natasha’s quarters and into the metal-clad corridor beyond. The crux of the problem was she was right and he knew it, and she knew that he knew it. But it wasn’t exactly a point he wanted to concede.

She reached over and ruffled his hair the way she knew he couldn’t quite bring himself to hate. He smiled in spite of himself.

“You’ll get along just fine without me,” she said.

He frowned. “I need you to tell me how.”

She scooched in closer then, till her arm nudged his, and she rested her head on his shoulder. He wrapped one arm around her back and rested his temple down against her hair. He knew what she was going to say before she said it. He wished she wouldn’t, but she went ahead and did it anyway.

“You just need a new partner,” she said.

***

Steve had told himself that waking up in the future for the second time really wasn’t so bad.

He’d told himself over and over that it was different because it was just a few years this time - not even ten years, let alone tens of them - so he couldn’t and shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. He’d told himself again and again in something like a slightly freaky mantra until he’d almost been able to believe it. Almost.

He woke the first time barely conscious in a huge glass tank in an unfamiliar med bay, submerged in some kind of translucent pink goo that he could feel inside his lungs and yet somehow he wasn’t drowning in it. He was embarrassingly naked and covered in electrodes with wires that swept up out of the tank and branched out to strange machines that looked more like something out of Tony Stark’s workroom than a medical centre. He could barely move. It probably wasn’t just because of the goo.

There was an identical tank just a few feet away, over to his right a few feet. Bucky was inside it. Steve’s stomach lurched but he passed out again before he could do any more than think about moving toward him. He wouldn't have made it out of the tank.

The second time he woke, he was stretched out in a starchy white hospital bed, the sort that hadn’t really changed in their essentials since way back in the second world war and probably not for years before that. When he asked, the doctor reluctantly told him it was now 2021 and Steve gritted his teeth and told himself that was fine, it would all be fine, it wasn’t a problem at all.

When he asked where Bucky was, the doc drew back a curtain and there he was on the other side, still in the tank, still suspended in that viscous pink goo that the pretty Russian nurse told him in her oddly formal English was some kind of medical gel, a temperature-controlled oxygen-rich environment used to treat hypothermia, amongst other things. Steve had to admit it wasn’t a shock that Bucky had hypothermia, considering the eight-year deep-freeze they’d been all too recently brought out of. He just hoped that was the worst of it.

When pressed, and he did press them, the medical staff all said they were confident that Bucky would wake but maybe not precisely soon; the problem was he just didn’t have the quite quantity of physiological enhancements working in his favour that Steve had and so they’d have to have a little patience. _He_ had to have patience. He wasn’t sure he knew how. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He wanted him out of that tank, awake and alive. Frankly, most of all, he wanted them both to be back in the 30s. Maybe he’d have done things differently, but then again maybe he wouldn't.

Bucky looked so thoroughly lifeless that Steve could barely stand to look at him, but even so he asked them not to close the curtain. He watched him float there in the tank the whole night through, motionless, by the eerie light of the various nonsense machines that they were both still very much attached to. He couldn’t sleep that night, something about sleeping so much of his life away keeping him awake in spite of the doctor’s best efforts to medicate him. By the end of the night, he almost wished the meds would work.

It would be okay, he thought. Everything would be okay. They were both alive; he didn't need anything else.

The marshal came in early the next morning and filled Steve in on how they’d been found, frozen through somewhere outside Vladivostok in an abandoned HYDRA bunker that had been unearthed during a recent kaiju attack. The marshal explained what he meant by ‘kaiju’ and Steve listened with the same kind of sick-heavy feeling inside that he’d felt when the sky had opened up that day back in New York. He asked why his friends hadn’t stopped it, the way they always did. It dawned on him almost as soon as he said it that he should’ve known the answer already - after all, they hadn’t found him when he’d gone missing finding Bucky. He’d woken up to strangers’ faces. When the answer came that almost all of his friends were dead, he wished he hadn’t asked at all.

There’d been some kind of civil war, they said, though he didn’t want to know the details. It’d killed Stark and Banner and pretty much every other hero or mutant on the planet, along with damn near everyone else even tangentially involved with SHIELD. The war had sent Thor home on a permanent basis and anyone else left alive had been locked up who knew where, the location a closely-guarded secret. All his friends were gone, in one way or another. All of them except for Bucky, and Bucky was still unconscious.

“I’m surprised they let me thaw you fellas out,” the marshal said. “At least I was before I found out why.”

Marshal Pentecost said he’d show him what he meant by that and so he led him out of the med bay and he showed him the shatterdome. The place was an immense steel-and-concrete hive of activity, full of mechanical noise and chatter, the biggest base of its kind that Steve had ever seen with several huge hangars and hordes of technicians and mechanics in oil-stained jumpsuits everywhere he looked. Nearly all of them stopped to stare as he passed by with the marshal, though Pentecost did his best to brush them off. They all still knew who he was, even in the generic black fatigues he’d been given to wear. He guessed he’d always be Captain America, no matter how long he lived.

Then they stepped into the control room and when he looked through the window out into the hangar he knew why he’d been brought back. They were painting his star on the jaeger before they’d ever asked him to pilot it.

He knew he wouldn’t say no.

***

“You’re an idiot,” Natasha said, the day she arrived at the shatterdome.

“I got you out of jail, didn’t I?”

She rolled her eyes dramatically. Steve was pleased to see she really hadn’t changed at all, except for a couple of stray grey hairs among the red.

The jaeger was codenamed Patriot Red, a name that Natasha found completely hilarious given the jaeger’s origins and the situation at hand. She’d been launched in 2018, Russian-made and one of the last of the mark-4s, stationed there in the Vladivostok shatterdome with the Korean mark-4 Nova Hyperion and Cherno Alpha, the Kaidanovskys’ old mark-1. Her first pilots had both died on the job. Her second team had retired through injury. Half the shatterdome’s techs thought she was cursed as a consequence, even if she’d written off three kaiju in a little under three years. Steve meant to prove them wrong.

The first time Natasha saw her, the jaeger was already painted up just like Captain America. She burst out laughing, looking completely unrepentant when the techs turned to stare.

“You want me to co-pilot _that_?” she said. “C’mon, Steve, big strong guy like Captain America, you should be able to handle that abomination’s neural load all by yourself.”

Steve shook his head. “Don’t think they didn’t suggest it,” he said. She didn’t look surprised, just a little amused.

There’d been an argument. A long one, in which he’d apparently had no say though it was far from the first time he'd been left out of a decision. In the end, they’d decided he was too valuable an asset to risk it and insisted on finding him a co-pilot; with Bucky in some kind of medically-induced coma there in the tank in the med bay, and likely still feeling just as murderous toward him even if he’d been awake, there’d only been one choice for the job. He’d asked for Natasha Romanov. He’d insisted on it. After all, he’d had to get her out of jail somehow.

They sat together crosslegged on the floor of Patriot’s conn pod for over an hour while Natasha mulled the whole thing over, as if she was ever going to refuse the get out of jail free card he was offering. She’d been confined in an undisclosed location since about four months after he’d disappeared with no sign she’d ever get out and Steve could only imagine how she must’ve hated every minute, but he guessed he had to appreciate this was a big step for her to take. After all, she might’ve told the world her secrets, but as far as he could understand it the drift was something else entirely. For himself, all he could think was better someone he knew than a stranger. For her, it was maybe just him or jail.

“What’s the worst that could happen?” she said in the end. And that was that. The two of them were jaeger pilots.

***

Bucky woke up eight months later.

Steve and Nat had just brought down a kaiju outside of Osaka when the news came in from control. Steve wasn’t sure if they should hurry back or not. Nat tried to distract him with stories whose endings he already knew because he knew all of her stories. He didn’t try to stop her despite that.

Bucky had tried to escape by the time they docked in the shatterdome; fortunately they’d found a way to disable his arm before he'd woken but even if they hadn’t, he’d been too weak to get past the armed guards posted at the med bay door. The doctor sedated him. Steve watched him struggle meekly against his restraints as the medication started to kick in.

“Bucky.”

“I don’t know who Bucky is.”

“ _You’re_ Bucky.”

And he laughed. It sounded so bitter that all Steve could do was leave him there.

They sent Bucky away three weeks later and by then Steve wasn’t so sure it was a bad idea. There were glimmers of Bucky there in the Winter Soldier, glimpses whenever Steve visited, whenever he wasn’t trying to lash out because apparently his missions still demanded it, but they couldn’t have him there in the shatterdome, not like that - not when he’d have brought the whole place down around them just to get to Steve if he’d gotten the chance. Even if Steve hadn’t cared about himself, and he guessed over-inflated self-interest was pretty much the last thing he could be accused of, they needed Vladivostok. They needed Patriot. And Patriot needed her pilots.

Steve wrote him a letter three days after they took him away. Nat gave him a look like he’d completely lost his mind but it wasn’t like it was the first time she’d done that. He honestly wasn’t sure that he hadn’t. After all, half the time she was in it.

It really hadn’t come as a surprise when he and Nat were signed off as drift compatible.

They’d sparred before, years before, before there’d been lines on Nat’s face and Godzilla had started to roam the Pacific. They sparred before their first neural handshake and it was just like old times somehow, in the gym with people watching them but that wasn’t exactly a foreign concept to him or to her. The other pilot hopefuls had been queuing up to fight her one by one for a week since she’d got there and she’d beaten them all, despite the fact Steve could tell she was still a little rusty from her prison stay. And then the losers all watched as the two of them took to the floor. They were willing her to fail because they all wanted her spot in the jaeger. Steve knew she knew and knew she didn’t care. It wasn’t like she made friends easily, or wanted to.

She was good and he was better but that didn’t really matter. They laughed and spun and threw each other all over the room; Steve felt good for the first time since he'd woken in the med bay. She was still so pleased to see him alive. He was thrilled the war he’d missed hadn’t killed her. They were compatible.

Their sparring match was what Steve wrote to Bucky the first time, in the first letter, looking back to that because explaining what it was like to be inside Nat’s head would’ve felt like some kind of betrayal even if he’d managed to find the words for it. They’d suited up that first morning and he’d told himself that it wasn’t much different to putting on his uniform just like all those times before, during the war and after it. They walked through the maze of corridors and out into the conn pod, giving one another one last tense smile as the techs hooked them in. Then the neural bridge came up and every barrier that there’d ever been between them fell right down.

The second letter was easier. He told Bucky about their first kaiju kill that day outside Osaka, the day Bucky had woken up. He told him every detail of how the battle went down, described the kaiju, described everything except the insanity that was the headspace he shared with Nat. He told him he was glad he was alive. He told him he hoped he was getting better. He didn’t tell him he’d visit because he knew it was a lie. Nat hadn’t quite taught him how to do that well and he hoped she never would.

Letters three and four talked about the past, their past, not that he guessed Bucky really remembered it, at least not in any meaningful way. He talked about New York and the two of them growing up together. He talked about the war and the Howling Commandos and what it had meant to think his best friend was dead. He talked about missing him, as clearly as his semi-awkward prose would allow. He missed him even though he’d got Nat there with him, all the time, like a voice in his head even when she wasn’t. Maybe he missed him more because of that.

He wrote once a week in the start and Nat looked at him with varying levels of pity and exasperation every single time.

“He’s not going to reply,” she told him, as gently as she could, but that didn’t exactly involve kid gloves where Natasha was concerned. The whole base knew he was writing to his nutcase best friend who was locked up in some kind of institution somewhere back in the US, where he couldn’t hurt anyone, not even himself. Steve had never thought to make it a secret. Everyone knew about Bucky. But Nat knew all the details, even if they were never discussed.

After six months he was down to twice monthly, then just once a month when they hit a year. The letters trailed off completely when they headed into year three. He didn’t know what else to say. There was so much he couldn’t put into words. He still felt the loss.

“He’s not going to reply,” Natasha said.

“I know,” he said. And he did know. The problem was he also knew she knew he hoped he was wrong.

***

“This won’t be easy,” Steve said.

Bucky just inclined his head, not quite a nod, and made no other reply. He tucked his long hair back behind his ears, pulled it into the best ponytail he could manage with the gloves of his drive suit covering both his hands, and he pushed his helmet down into place over the top.

“Ready?” Steve asked.

“Ready,” Bucky confirmed.

Steve’s stomach lurched. It wouldn’t be easy for either of them.

***

In 2024, their fifth kaiju put them both in the hospital.

Steve woke first, pained and panicked. He fell from the bed as he tried to stand on his shattered knee, brought down a curtain and the curtain rail on top of himself like a complete and total idiot as he tried to stay upright, then knocked over two machines and an instrument tray with a clatter that brought the doctor, a nurse and two armed guards running in at full tilt. He managed to sit up on the floor without further incident and spent a long moment catching his breath.

“Where’s Natasha?” he asked. He felt sick. His head was spinning.

She was in the tank. Steve was pretty sure it was the same one Bucky had been in, and that didn’t exactly reassure him.

The very proper Russian nurse told him this was another of the tank’s myriad potential uses, helping bone to knit, helping tissue to repair. Nat had three broken ribs, a ruptured spleen, a compound fracture of the tibia and an odd break in her cervical spine that no one liked the look of. Steve barely even noticed she was naked in the tank, she was so covered in cuts and bruises and surgical sutures. It was like Bucky all over again. He couldn't lose her, not when he'd lost everything else. 

“She’ll regain consciousness eventually,” the doctor told him. “But I can’t guarantee she’ll walk again.”

She walked again. Quite soon after that, in fact, though Steve’s shattered knee healed in a fraction of the time and came out of it just as good as new. But when they trained and when they went out in the jaeger, when they sparred in the gym, it was obvious to both of them that she would never be the same. She wasn’t as quick and she wasn’t getting any quicker. She was hurting, straining, all the time, in every moment and every manoeuvre. She’d never quite kept up with him physically but the gap had widened, and it wasn’t improving.

Once upon a time she’d have hidden it from him but now she didn’t even try, as if that would have made a difference if she had; Steve could feel it in the drift, though they didn’t speak about it after, how quickly she tired, how much pain she was in. There was no way she could take the pain meds she'd need to stay out there and still stay on the ball. He was losing another partner and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“You just need a new partner,” she said.

And so he wrote to Bucky.

It had been three years since they’d been pulled out of that HYDRA bunker. They hadn’t even spoken once since Bucky had left Russia and then there he was again, standing in the jaeger bay when Steve walked in, staring up at Patriot.

“What do you think?” Steve asked. He'd talked to the doctors back in the US and they assured him extensively of Bucky's progress, but he hung back despite that, keeping his distance. Just in case, he told himself, just in case it happened again, though it still felt so unnatural to him where Bucky was concerned.   
Bucky didn’t turn. “They look smaller on TV,” he said.

Steve chuckled. Bucky didn’t. It wasn't an auspicious start.

Nat told him not to worry. They sat in her room, on her bed with their backs to the wall. She held his hand because she knew he’d feel better because of it. He was grateful but knew he didn’t have to say so, which was just as well because he knew there'd have been mockery involved. 

“We’ll always be friends,” she said, her hand warm against his, but the sentiment felt surprisingly hollow. He’d miss her in ways he couldn’t explain. He guessed she understood because the smile at her lips didn’t quite reach her eyes. They both knew friendship wasn't partnership.

She helped to train Bucky while Steve kept fastidiously, conspicuously out of the way, skulking on the sidelines almost like he was ashamed to be watching them. Bucky was faster than her, stronger, but apparently his time away had taught him something not unlike control. He wasn’t trying to kill her, at least; he was just trying to win. Steve wished he could feel relieved but he felt certain other things with more immediacy.

That first day, afterwards, Steve waited in Natasha’s room while she showered, stretched out on her bed because something about his own room seemed sort of sad. They’d always spent more of their time in her room anyway, like that was natural and maybe it was because there was no one else alive who understood what they’d both lost, collectively and apart. They'd gotten each other through so much, just by being there. Maybe shared trauma was part of their success.

He was sure half the base thought they were sleeping together but that wasn’t really what they were about, though it didn’t really help that the married Kaidanovskys weren’t great confirmation that mixed-sex jaeger teams weren’t necessarily knocking boots all day and night. They’d done it precisely twice since they'd known each other and both times since had only happened since they'd first drifted: once to get the whole thing out of the way so they wouldn't get tied up in knots with what ifs in the drift, and once more a year or so later just to reconfirm it wasn’t something their relationship missed. It was good, yes, but it wasn’t _that_ good. They were neither of them who the other wanted, as easy as it would’ve been for them if they had. They both still felt their losses acutely. And Bucky had never looked at him that way anyway.

Nat just gave him a fraction of a smile as she stepped inside and found him there, not shy in the least about stripping in front of him to pull on her Corps-issue pyjamas. She’d never been particularly shy with him before, but something about the drift had changed them both, personalities bleeding into one another in a hundred subtle ways that no one else left out there in the world knew either of them well enough to notice, the general ease they shared just another unexpected byproduct that . Somehow the scars from the kaiju attack were more shocking to him than her nakedness, still jagged and livid on her skin. Sometimes it bothered him that he healed so much faster than she did. He'd have gladly given up at least a portion of that particular talent to help her if he could. Her or Bucky. Either. Both.

“He’ll be fine,” she said, as she stretched out on her side there next to him, her head propped up on one hand. “You, on the other hand…”

He flicked the end of her nose. She chuckled, settling down with her head against his chest and an arm around his waist, but they both knew she was serious. After all, they had no secrets from each other and hadn't had for years. Soon he’d have no secrets from Bucky, either.

***

The first time Steve drifted with Natasha, he hadn’t known what to expect.

Though the Kaidanovskys spoke surprisingly good English, they didn’t seem the type to enter into a heart-to-heart with Captain America. Yuna and So-Yi weren’t exactly garrulous even in Korean and there was precious little access to anyone else who’d ever actually drifted; pilots didn’t have a great life expectancy, inter-shatterdome pilot communication was somewhat lacking and all the techies could tell him was that some experienced jaeger pilots didn’t even need to speak to each other when they were connected. Were he completely honest, that idea sort of spooked him.

They got hooked up and suddenly he was in Nat’s head, or she was in his, or maybe both those things together. She was just a little red-headed girl with pigtails but somehow it was very much still her in spite of that. He was a skinny kid again, dressed like he’d just stepped incongruously out of the 1930s. They looked at each other across the chilly training room that wasn’t real anywhere in the world now except in Natasha’s memories, and together they made the decision. They didn’t need words and somehow that idea no longer spooked him.

They turned away from their pasts, deliberately and consciously, and they brought the jaeger online. Their jaeger.

There was always something different there in the first moment that they drifted, something he remembered or something of Nat’s, something they’d constructed together out of bits of and pieces of them both. He saw her wrap her hands around a man’s neck and squeeze till he fell to the floor. She saw him beaten in an alley, saw him shoot a man and wipe the blood from the star on his chest. They each saw themselves the way the other saw them and sometimes it was close to overwhelming how deep that went, just like mirrors reflecting mirrors until it was hard to tell whose memories were whose. It took seconds to tell the story of years that no one else knew but them. Then Nat would grin or Steve would or maybe both and their petty intrigues and embarrassments really didn’t matter anymore. While they were in the jaeger, they were the exact same person. And not.

“Ready?” Steve asked.

“Ready,” Bucky confirmed.

The techs plugged them in.

They fell. They were terrified, jittering, so cold it hurt. Something exploded, scorching, the smell of burning paint and rubber and hair and something sickly-sweet on the air, hearts hammering in their chests. The metal arm could feel; it could feel the warmth of Steve’s skin even through his uniform. Black. Bile. A medal. A mask. _Falling_.

Bucky was broken; Bucky had changed. PTSD didn’t even begin to cover it. Steve's own issues felt petty by comparison.

“We’ll start trials in the morning.” Their CO was already planning replacements when they’d gotten out of the jaeger.

“They’ll make it,” Nat said, thankfully meaning Steve didn't have to try to articulate through his horror or confusion. 

“They blew it.”

“ _They’ll make it_ ,” Nat said.

The look on Bucky’s face was thunderous, like every time Steve had gotten himself into a fight he couldn't handle, like every time someone had picked on his best bud though there was a different edge to it now. Steve guessed his own look wasn’t much better. Nat was somehow the reasonable one of the three.

Their CO looked from Bucky to Steve to Natasha, paused and then sighed. He nodded curtly. 

“One week,” he said. “They don’t have it together one week from today, _he_ goes back to the goddamn asylum and _he_ gets a new co-pilot." He gave Nat a hard look. "One of the trainees, Romanov, not some new bleeding-heart waif or stray.”

The next day was sparring. Nat said something about it being an exercise in increasing their mutual awareness but that sounded like so very tenuous an excuse that Steve strongly suspected she had some sort of ulterior motive. It was still so strange not to be connected to her. It almost felt like she was still in his head but then not but then yes.

Bucky wasn’t the match for him in combat that he’d been before the freeze and the both found it visibly frustrating. Steve laid him out flat in every round for the first half hour, feeling a flash of irritation every time he did it though he couldn’t figure out if he was irritated with himself or with Bucky instead or with the whole darn situation. Nat frowned at him. He frowned at her. She helped Bucky up and cuffed Steve around the head, a little harder than anyone but him would've handled with equanimity but she knew his limits just as well as he knew hers.

“You’re being an ass,” she said, like he’d needed her to say it. Bucky snorted. Steve guessed she’d said it more for Bucky’s benefit than for his. 

They started again. He went to bed that night tired, sore and conflicted. He doubted it would be the last time.

The next morning, he found out they didn’t need to be in a jaeger to drift.

***

One week to the day, they brought the jaeger online with near-perfect synchronisation. It was enough to convince their CO to give the two of them a real shot together, but Steve knew they had a long way to go. Their off-the-books drifting sessions in the lab with Natasha could only get them so far. There was something still missing. Something was still off.

That evening, after a rowdy dinner in the canteen with a jovial group of techs and Nat sitting next to him with a look of faint amusement that barely left her face, he went back to his quarters. The door was ajar. Bucky was sitting inside, waiting.

“I don’t know if I remember or if I’m just seeing what you saw,” Bucky said.

“Does it matter?”

“I don’t know.”

Steve took a seat next to him on the bed, pretending not to notice how Bucky flinched as he did so. He pulled up his knees and rested his forearms against them, leaning back against the cold concrete wall, trying to look nonchalant about it when his insides weren’t entirely sure what nonchalant meant.

“You stopped writing,” Bucky said, glancing at him furtively, the long hair providing at least minimal camouflage.

“I didn’t know what else to say.” Steve shrugged slightly, not convinced that he was telling the truth but not exactly lying, either.

“You’ve never exactly been lost for words, Steve.” Bucky frowned. “I don’t know why I said that.” He frowned and then turned to Steve, actually turned bodily to face him, settling himself cross-legged on the well-made bed. Steve hadn’t lost the knack of making a bed with military precision, no matter how much time he’d spent on ice. “Tell me why you stopped writing.” Steve frowned. “Don’t lie. I’ll know if you lie.”

“Well, you never wrote back.”

“Did you want me to?”

“That’s kinda the point of writing letters, Buck.”

Bucky smiled and for a second it was like it was him again, really him. But then he stood and he walked away and it was so damn sudden and so damn wrenching that Steve couldn’t even watch him go, except he half-turned in the doorway, looking back at him over his shoulder. Steve couldn't read the look on his face. That look wasn't his Bucky at all.  
“When you asked me to come, I came,” Bucky said. And he left.

***

“You’re being an ass again,” Nat said.

Steve sighed, but he guessed he couldn’t fault her logic.

She was doing chin-ups in the gym while Steve was lying uselessly on a crash mat there on the floor a few feet away, feeling more than a little dramatic. She wasn’t a pilot anymore but that didn’t mean she wasn’t useful; they’d assigned her to training, and her current list of projects was still very much just Rogers and Barnes. He wasn’t sure if that was reassuring or not.

He and Bucky had killed their first kaiju four hours earlier and it’d felt good at the time, felt sort of right and wrong at the same time because damn if they weren’t good together out there. They were faster and stronger than any other jaeger team in service, held back only by the mechanics of the jaeger itself. Okay, so they had 97% synchronisation at best, but they were still, objectively, better than all the rest because everything else they had made up for it. The only problem was that three lousy percent nagged at him. They weren’t completely together and weren't completely with the jaeger. They’d almost slipped. More than once.

“It’s not his fault.”

Steve kicked up and rolled backwards rather gracelessly off the mat, finding it hard to care about his form for the time being. Sometimes he missed his shield but he guessed there'd never be enough vibranium in the world to build one for Patriot. Nat dropped down from the bar and turned to him, hands on hips.

“It’s not his fault he’s not the guy you remember.”

“But he is.”

“And he’s not.”

Steve chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment, then shrugged to concede the point. “Yeah,” he said. “And he’s not.”

“So stop acting like he’s doing it to spite you.”

Bucky was in his room again. The whole room smelled of the oddly fruity standard issue Defense Corps shampoo and there was a damp patch spreading across Steve’s pillow where Bucky’s wet hair lay against it. He had his metal hand a couple of feet in front of his face, flexing its fingers, watching how it moved, and Steve watched with him for one long moment.

“I never thought about it much before,” Bucky said. “I guess it’s pretty cool.”

Steve chuckled as he crossed the room and took a seat on the bed by Bucky’s hip. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool,” he said, glancing back at him over his shoulder, watching him still lying there on top of the blanket. “You don’t see one of those every day. Except I guess you kinda do.”

Bucky gave a short chuff of laughter and then reached up and set his metal palm over Steve’s bicep, making him shiver.

“You’re warm,” Bucky said.

“I’m pretty sure you’re cold,” Steve replied, a small smile tugging at his mouth despite his apprehension.

Bucky started to pull his hand away and Steve caught him by the wrist before he'd even known he was going to do it, turning on the bed to look down at him. He rubbed the pad of his thumb over the spot where Bucky’s pulse ought to have been there but wasn’t, followed his arm up to the inner crease of his elbow, palm and fingertips skimming slowly over metal. He knew the metal arm could feel because he'd felt it through Bucky in the drift; somehow he found himself wondering if it could feel ticklish, like Bucky had used to be. He didn’t test it. Maybe he didn't want to know.

“Did it hurt?” he asked, though he guessed he knew the answer because the feeling had reached him in the drift a dozen times or more. His hand moved up higher, settled at the place where metal met flesh. He knew he shouldn't. He couldn't stop.

“It all hurt.” Bucky shifted slightly and Steve felt the metal move under his hand. “But not now.” He sat up, pulled his legs in, tucked his hair behind his ears. “Do I really know you or is it just the drift?” he asked.

Steve looked at him as he paused, rubbing at the back of his neck.

“It’s both, I think,” he said.  
Somehow, Bucky seemed satisfied with that. Steve wished he could be, too.

***

One day, he had a stupid idea. He told Nat. She told him it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. They went ahead and did it anyway.

All they really needed was a couple of headsets because the rest of the technical crap in the conn pod was all just there to control the jaeger. They weren’t trying to control a jaeger; they were just trying to drift.

“It’s like I’m in his head, too,” Nat told him, after. “You two have issues. Big ones.”

Drifting with Nat wasn’t like drifting with Bucky except in the mechanics, because that first week after Bucky had arrived, after their first dismally failed neural bridge, they’d been in the same place on the same benches in the same lab, wearing the same pair of headsets. The first few drifts with Bucky had been bad, they’d brought up stuff Steve hadn’t even remembered before and it was strange because he couldn’t figure out if that was part of his memory or Bucky’s. Then there were the broken parts in Bucky’s head that Steve kept latching onto. Steve had known pretty much from the start that Bucky would never be the same again and he knew they needed to move past that. In a way, he could feel that Bucky already had. There was really something to be said for in-patient therapy.

Drifting with Nat wasn’t like drifting with Bucky. Drifting with Nat was easy, had been weird in the start but then like they’d never known any different, like he guessed it would’ve been with Bucky before the death that hadn't really been death. But Steve could handle difficult. He told himself it would all be fine. They'd be like they used to be again, they just needed time. He wasn't even fooling himself, let alone anyone else.

He and Natasha picked at a meal afterwards, sitting at the tiny table in her room, trying to pretend that what was bothering them both wasn’t bothering them at all. Then Nat set down her fork with a clatter and cocked her head at him, hands resting at the edge of the table. She drummed her fingers. 

“Don’t tell me,” Steve said. “I’m being an ass.”

Nat raised her brows. “And?”

“And I need to talk to him.”

“Or?”

“Or I’ll screw everything up for good?”

Natasha nodded, satisfied, retrieved her fork, and dinner continued as if nothing had ever happened at all. It was difficult to accuse them of not knowing how to communicate. 

But then Bucky was in his room again. 

He didn't speak and neither did Steve. He was sitting there on the bed with his knees hugged into his chest, his hair tied back the way he'd started to do even when they weren't in the jaeger. He didn't even look up and so Steve just sat down next to him, wiping his palms on the thighs of his faded combat pants.

He'd spent a month in Bucky's head by then, off and on, and he still had no more idea what he was thinking than he had done before they'd started. With Nat it'd been so easy, they'd just accepted what they'd seen and moved on. With Bucky... Steve guessed even when there were no barriers between them, there were things left unsaid. Moving on had been harder than expected.

Bucky moved first. He didn't look at Steve, not right away, just shifted and turned, slowly, deliberately, like he was giving Steve time to acclimatise to the idea that he was coming toward him, like Steve were the skittish one. He planted one knee at the side of Steve's thigh and he straddled his lap, sat back against Steve's legs and he still hadn't looked at him. Steve frowned as Bucky's hands found the hem of his shirt and drifted up over the top of it, skimming his chest, up past his shoulders to the back of his neck and _still_ he didn't look at him. Bucky was practically hanging his head in front of Steve, long hair for once out of its now customary ponytail and framing his face that way Steve still couldn't quite find familiar. There were so many things about Bucky he didn't recognise these days as he played spot the difference.

Metal fingers brushed against the back of Steve's neck, making him shiver with the chill of it. Then Bucky's eyes flickered up to meet his, just in the instant before Bucky kissed him. Steve wasn't sure if it was the eye contact or the kiss that made his pulse skip the way it did, or maybe just the topsy-turvy inside-out feeling of his perverted wish-fulfilment. 

It was mad. It was completely and utterly mad but Steve couldn't bring himself to stop it. He meant to, really he did, but his hands came up to Bucky's waist instead of pushing him away, took two handfuls of his shirt and pulled him closer. Warm fingers settled in Steve's hair, fingertips there against his scalp and he leant away from the wall he'd been leaning against, leant forward against Bucky, pushed up into that kiss like an idiot. He tangled the fingers of one hand in Bucky's long hair, tasting coffee and toothpaste and something almost spicy that he couldn't quite place as their mouths pressed together, as Bucky's teeth grazed his bottom lip, as the kiss deepened almost painfully softly and Steve's heart hammered hard. 

Bucky's metal hand slid between them, moved down, pressed down tentatively over the front of Steve's pants and Steve's breath caught. He should've pushed him away because Bucky shouldn't have wanted this but he didn't stop, he _didn't_ , he just watched as Bucky pulled away with his gaze carefully averted, his lips slightly parted, and he didn't stop him going down to his knees on the floor. He didn't catch Bucky's hands as they moved over his thighs, didn't take his wrists as his fingers hooked under the waistband of his pants and pulled down slowly. Like a fool or a coward or some kind of lecher he actually lifted his hips and let Bucky pull down, stripping him naked from waist to knee. He should've stopped it but he shifted forward to the edge of the bed instead, let Bucky brush the stubble on his cheek against the soft skin of his inner thigh as Steve just leaned back uselessly on his hands, knees spread wide, to watch him do it. 

Bucky glanced up, met his gaze just as he let his bottom lip brush the head of Steve's cock. Steve bit back a protest or a moan or a curse and he wasn't sure which and wasn't sure if that mattered. 

Bucky took him in his mouth. Steve knew there was no more protest in him, if there'd ever been any at all. 

***

"Steve, that's not talking," Nat said. "That's pretty much the antithesis of talking."

He had his head in his hands and she cuffed him round the back of it in that way that seemed to be becoming a worryingly regular thing though did, at least, usually have the desired effect. He sat up. Her look said _cut out the melodrama_ and so he attempted to do so. He was Captain America, after all, not a lovelorn teenager.

Bucky spent mealtimes with the Kaidanovskys who oddly didn't seem to mind too much. They spoke Russian but that wasn't a surprise given their histories and the location of the shatterdome, but something about hearing Bucky say the words made Steve feel weird inside. He knew he was being dumb about it, if only because he still ate with Nat three times daily and she spoke Russian like a champion, but _his_ Bucky had never known another language except the dirty words in Spanish. He'd been oddly good at those. 

He couldn't tell if Bucky was avoiding him or if he was avoiding Bucky or if it was a too-subtle mixture of the two. He spent the morning in the gym, half-distracted by the sound of Yuna and So-Yi's clashing fencing foils or maybe, just maybe, he had something else on his mind. He spent the afternoon reading a book that had been written eighty years after he was born. Sometimes he had trouble really understanding he was over a hundred years old. He guessed these days he wasn't the only one in that particular position.

He met Nat in the canteen for dinner and they argued good-naturedly over a movie they'd both seen when they were seventeen, just in two very different decades. They walked back to their quarters together; she was still just across the hall and Steve realised he only knew where Bucky slept because he'd seen it in the drift. He bypassed his own door and he went there instead, down the corridor and round the corner, far enough that he had second thoughts about eight times on the way but still wound up knocking on the door in the end with no idea what he'd say, if anything.

Bucky opened the door. The barest hint of a smile quirked at the corners of his mouth as he tilted his head at Steve. Then he stepped out of the doorway and let him come inside, and Steve closed the door behind them as he took a long, deep breath. It didn't steady him the way he'd hoped it would.

Bucky was barefoot and shirtless and sat back down cross-legged on the floor where he'd apparently been before the knock, in front of an immense half-completed jigsaw puzzle that seemed to be a scene from Star Wars. However many times they'd drifted, he hadn't seen that coming, guessed it must have been a habit he'd picked up in the hospital where they'd tried to fix his head and maybe managed it to an extent. In the drift he'd seen white rooms and white coats and tight leather restraints, blood on walls and then a kind of peace that wove the broken parts together in a way that only made sense to Steve when their minds were connected. They'd gotten past their traumas, learned to set it aside in the jaeger the way they did the rest of the time. Steve just wished... He wished a lot of things.

Bucky just looked amused at Steve's jigsaw-related reaction and Steve guessed he felt that way too until his eyes wandered down to Bucky's shoulder, where the metal arm met the rest of him, to the tangle of angry scars. 

He knew what they looked like, of course; he'd seen them through Bucky's eyes, felt the procedure, felt the join with his own hands over Bucky's shirt. But he hadn't _seen_ them. 

"You're staring," Bucky said. Steve felt his cheeks flush and looked away and that was ridiculous, he knew it was when the only secrets they could have from each other were by tacit agreement. Then Bucky picked himself back up off the floor and took a step over the incomplete puzzle, took a step toward Steve and tilted up his chin with metal fingers. "You can look."

So he did. 

He started at his shoulder, in close, glancing at Bucky to make sure it was okay as he brought his hand up to touch. The look said touch was fine. It shouldn't have been fine. 

The metal was warm there where it met Bucky's skin, body temperature and oddly fascinating. He followed the line down and Bucky lifted his arm, let him trace the seam that circled under and skimmed past his ribs and he snickered; Steve smiled in spite of himself, in spite of the situation, because apparently after everything Bucky was still ticklish. He had that to hold onto, at least.

He stepped around behind him next, followed the line up to where his shoulder blade should have been, had been before. He paused, fingertips resting against metal and skin. His stomach turned anxiously. Then he pressed his mouth to that line between skin and metal, wrapped his arms around Bucky's waist and held on tight because he wasn't sure what else to do. 

Steve was as confused as he'd ever been in his life. Bucky just chuckled and leaned back against him. 

***

Their second kaiju was as easy as the first, and as hard. That goddamn three percent haunted him. 

Steve cursed to himself as he left the conn pod and headed for the drive suit room. The techs took off the spinal connector and he stripped out of the suit as quickly as he could without physically harming what he guessed was an expensive piece of Pan Pacific Defense Corps equipment; he'd have offered to pay to replace it but it occurred to him he wasn't actually being paid at all. There was something about doing his duty and doing the right thing that seemed to come with a surprising dearth of remuneration, not that he usually objected.

He broke three tiles with his fist in the showers and told himself they could take it out of his non-existent wages, feeling only faintly guilty for it. Then he headed for Nat's room. 

She wasn't there. She wasn't in ops and she wasn't in the gym, wasn't eating in the canteen, wasn't with the techs or in his room, either. He rested his forehead down heavily against the metal of Bucky's door and sighed. Bucky hadn't rushed from the jaeger like he had, hadn't been anywhere near as irrationally angry as Steve had, hadn't actually been angry at all because he didn't seem to _get_ angry anymore, and he also hadn't stormed off around the base like a lunatic so he was probably inside the room. He guessed Nat was, too. 

He turned away and went back to his own room, avoiding the conversation he didn't want to have. He was getting really good at that. He didn't exactly feel proud of his new skill.

Bucky snuck into his room sometime past midnight, not that day and night really meant a lot inside the shatterdome's windowless crew quarters. Steve woke with a start as the door opened, still a light sleeper, still a poor dreamer after all those years that he guessed weren't so very many to him personally, and saw Bucky silhouetted in the doorway. He closed the door behind him, plunged the room back into darkness and Steve waited, lying there, no idea what to expect until Bucky pulled back the blanket and slid into the bed beside him. 

Bucky straddled his thighs, hands resting down on Steve's bare chest and he cursed himself for the laziness that was getting into bed in his underwear instead of changing into unflattering PPDC PJs. The shatterdome was never silent but all Steve could hear was his own quickening heartbeat and Bucky's breathing as he leaned down, mouth and hair brushing against Steve's chest in the pitch dark. Bucky moved down lower, slowly, trailing kisses on his skin that felt hot in the cool air since the blanket was working its way lower down the bed with each inch that Bucky moved. Bucky tugged at Steve's underwear and to his everlasting shame he actually lifted his hips to let him pull it off. Bucky moved, a rustle of clothing and then he was just as naked as Steve was. It was thrilling. It was wrong. Bucky had never wanted this. Bucky had never wanted _him_. 

Steve knew they shouldn't do it. He _knew_ it. But he was already hard and so was Bucky, pressing against his hip as he leaned down to kiss him. The sound of a container popping open next, a warm hand spreading chilly gel and he should've stopped it except he wasn't sure how he could stop it when he couldn't quite believe it was happening. Bucky knelt up, took him in his hand then pressed back down, slowly, firmly. Steve drew a sharp breath. His hands went to Bucky's thighs, gripping tight. He couldn't believe he was inside him. He couldn't believe Bucky wanted it. He knew he did. He knew he shouldn't.

In spite of his incredible stamina, or perhaps to his embarrassment because of it, it didn't last long. Bucky shifted, rocked his hips and Steve pushed up, bracing with his back and heels, hands going up to Bucky's waist and holding there. Bucky's breath quickened. Steve moved one hand, let his knuckles brush against the length of Bucky's cock and that made him press down sharply, the hitch in his breath loud in the quiet room. Steve turned his hand, stroked him as he moved, heard the hitch in Bucky's breath almost turn to something vocal as their speed increased, faster, erratic.

He was gone a minute after they finished. Steve felt cold. 

It happened again two nights later, again the night after that, again and again. Bucky's skin was hot against him, counterpoint to the strange chill of his metal hand as he trailed cold fingertips over Steve's collarbone, down his chest, circled his cock. They'd rub against each other, Bucky's mouth at the crook of his neck, they'd kiss or they'd go all the way, just the idea of it still oddly thrilling to the guy who'd never had any luck in his younger days. It was heady. It was more than he'd imagined. It was totally, crushingly, comprehensively _wrong_.

Bucky left his room and Steve pressed a pillow over his face and yelled, laughed out loud at his own fundamental idiocy. Because what if, _what if_ , Bucky wanted it because _he_ wanted it, because he'd pulled it out of the drift any of the dozens of times they'd been connected and just made it real to fill a HYDRA redaction of the basic data that was Bucky Barnes. This was so incredibly screwed up. He'd gone right ahead and screwed everything up, just like Natasha had warned him.

"I know," he told Nat as he sat down with his tray the next morning at breakfast. 

She shrugged. "You're being an ass," she said, between bites of pancake smothered in syrup. He helped himself to a forkful, earning himself a glare that she didn't quite mean. 

"I think I'm taking advantage of him."

She glanced up, her look withering, then returned to her pancakes once again. "No, you're not," she said. "You're just being an ass." She was usually right. He would've liked to have believed; he just needed to persuade himself.

Bucky joined them a couple of minutes later, with a bowl of cornflakes and two mugs of coffee that were apparently both for him. Steve looked at him, sitting there as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened and maybe like they ate together every day except they'd _never_ eaten together, not even once, since he'd arrived in the shatterdome three months earlier. Nat seemed to take it in stride somehow. Steve guessed he was the only one who didn't get it. 

"Are we sparring today?" Nat asked Bucky and he nodded, swallowing a mouthful of cornflakes washed down with strong black coffee. 

"Sure," he said. "I'll see you in the gym in an hour?" 

"Sounds great."

Nat seemed pleased with this. So did Bucky. They struck up a conversation and Steve felt roughly like he was losing his mind. 

He watched them in the gym, trying to act like he wasn't but he was pretty sure it was obvious to both of them and anyone else in the general vicinity. After all, the both probably knew him just as well as he knew himself, and subtlety wasn't something he'd learned from Natasha. 

They looked like they were having fun and Steve didn't know what to make of that, didn't know if he was jealous or how he was meant to react and wasn't even sure if he was entitled to a reaction at all; he didn't have quite the measure of self-importance required to believe everything they did was for his benefit, though it did seem kind of hinky. But then Nat pulled up, called time out, stretched her neck a little from side to side and declared the match over for the time being. She called to Steve. He jogged over like none of this fazed him at all but they probably both knew better. Of course they both knew better. 

"Your turn," Nat said, gesturing to the mats, and he guessed he couldn't say no. Bucky looked amused. Steve couldn't help but feel at least a little awkward as he tugged off his shoes to join him there.

Sparring with Bucky since he'd turned up alive again was entirely different than he guessed it would've been before. He could've beaten his old friend in twenty seconds flat, if that. Twenty minutes and the new Bucky was still giving as good as he got, now he'd gotten back up to fighting fitness. Steve knew neither of them was trying to win, they were fighting for the fight, for the adrenaline, for reinforcement of the fact that the two of them were drift compatible in spite of everything they'd done or they'd left unsaid. Bucky hit him hard across the jaw. Steve swept Bucky's legs out from under him and he went down hard, but Bucky just laughed and held out his metal hand so Steve tugged him up to his feet. 

"I guess we call it a draw," Bucky said, standing almost too close. 

"Yeah, it's a draw," Steve agreed, a fraction too quickly, and somewhere in the back of his mind Natasha rolled her eyes at him. He headed to the showers in an attempt to avoid the actual physical her; his attempt was a success in that respect, but Bucky joined him and at that point he couldn't exactly call his success resounding. 

"We're getting better," Bucky said, almost casual, as they stepped in under separate shower heads. 

"We still need that three percent," Steve replied. 

"Then do what you have to do," Bucky said, and Steve squeezed his eyes shut under the spray, almost like he could pretend the water was the reason why he'd done it and not the fact he didn't want to hear this. "You know I'm not the problem." 

Bucky paused, like he was trying to decide if he would continue, if he could or should maybe based on whether Steve actually responded at all. He sighed when Steve said nothing, drummed metal fingers loudly against tile, then he moved and though Steve didn't even open his eyes for a second he could hear him do it, bare feet on the wet floor, could feel him as he came in close, closer, set his hands at Steve's hips and pressed in against his back, bare skin to skin like that wasn't jarring when before, in the beginning, there'd never been anything like that between them, as much as Steve might have wanted it sometimes. 

Steve willed him not to speak. Bucky must have known it. He spoke anyway.

"I spent three years locked up with doctors trying to talk me sane," Bucky said, against his shoulder, just loud enough to hear over the hiss of the spray. "I spent three years trying to be the guy in your letters. But I'm not him anymore." 

Steve rested his forehead down against the cold tiles like that was going to block this out or put him off but Bucky wrapped his arms around him from behind, holding him there, keeping him there, hot and hard and almost too tight. 

"Yeah, he's part of me. You know that. But I'm also something else now and you know that, too." 

And he was right because Steve knew. Bucky knew that he knew and Steve knew Bucky knew that he knew, on and on in that infinitely recursive way that made Steve's head hurt to think about it. Bucky had all of Steve's memories of him there in his head from the drift and some of his own from the time before the fall and Steve knew because he'd seen them. He sometimes talked the same way he used to, gestured some way that made Steve ache with familiarity because it almost felt like the way they'd been before, best friends, best buds, best pals, clowning around. But it wasn't. It could never be.   
"I won't apologise for not being him," Bucky said. "Beat yourself up for screwing the guy who never wanted you that way before if that helps you sleep at night but your fucking disappointment in me is _your_ problem."

He left him alone, suddenly, coldly. Steve took a shaky breath. He didn't trust himself to move.

Bucky was right; he wasn't the problem. The problem was Steve and it had been him all along. _He_ was the three percent.

***

Someone else saved the world from the kaiju. 

When the jaeger program was cut, it came as a surprise. Marshal Pentecost had somehow kept political opinion far away from the pilots and shut away in Vladivostok they didn't get a whole lot in the way of broadcast news. Their days were otherwise engaged. Besides, Steve had had a lot on his mind.

The base began to wind down almost immediately and Steve had to question what the hell was going on. He'd seen the progress being made on the wall, of course, strolling past sections of it in the jaeger with Bucky, watching camera feeds from the other jaegers as they went out for manoeuvres. It was monumentally dumb and the kaiju were going to get through sooner or later, as he told anyone who asked his opinion on the matter and then some more who hadn't. He'd found he wasn't nearly as guarded anymore, since drifting had commenced. He couldn't tell if it was Nat or Bucky who'd been the bad influence. He found he didn't care either way.

Then Pentecost called Cherno and Patriot over to the Hong Kong shatterdome. Striker Eureka, Crimson Typhoon and their crews were already there. Gipsy Danger looked just like all the photos.

Operation Pitfall was the dumbest, most suicidal plan Steve had ever heard, and that was saying something for a guy who'd stormed HYDRA bases, jumped from planes without a parachute and spent a fair amount of time with Tony Stark. The problem was, of course, that it simply had to be done and it absolutely had to succeed. Steve kept his opinions to himself on that point. He and Bucky didn't even need to discuss it: they were in. Of course they were in. It was time to save the world again.

Raleigh Becket and Mako Mori got there first. Someone else saved the world from the kaiju, and Steve was surprisingly fine with that because not only was the breach sealed tight and the world saved from all but certain doom, but he and Bucky had hit 100% at long last. He'd let go and they'd been perfect. They'd survived the category V kaiju, the bomb, the mission. They'd all come home alive. 

The problem was he just didn't know what he was going to do in the world now without the jaeger, without the drift, without Bucky.

When the celebration ended - and the celebration was considerable indeed - Steve wandered the shatterdome's corridors. Hong Kong was just like Vladivostok except for the vast hangar size, but somehow it felt oddly like he'd left his home in Russia. Then there he was outside the door of Bucky's new quarters, though the interior was just like the old one. He paused, and then he knocked.

"It's open," Bucky yelled. Steve opened the door and stepped inside. He paused a fraction of a second and then he closed the door behind him. Bucky looked at him and put down the book he was reading. Steve just stood there in the centre of the room a little awkwardly, rubbed his palms on his thighs and wondered how it'd come to be that he was nervous around a guy he'd shared everything with, even one he'd only really known for the past few months when it really came down to it. Bucky, however, didn't seem surprised to see him. The drift was weird that way. 

"Three percent really made a difference," Steve said, knowing he was stating the obvious, cursing himself for the inanity. 

The jaeger had performed perfectly. Their connection had been flawless. All it had taken was for Steve to admit to himself what he'd been fighting against for months, since before Bucky had even arrived at the shatterdome, since before he'd woken, before all of that, since the moment Steve had first known he hadn't died; Bucky had changed. He would never be everything he'd been before, and so he'd filled the spaces with something new instead. There was nothing missing in him, nothing broken; he was perfectly whole, just different. Bucky had accepted that difference. Now Steve had to, too. 

There were so many apologies he'd needed to make and so he'd made them in the drift, in that second of clarity where he couldn't even lie to himself, let alone to Bucky. Bucky had understood. No more words were needed. Everything was clear. 

"You always were a perfectionist," Bucky said, the tone familiar but the smile on his face made Steve's pulse quicken. He'd lost one man he'd loved and gained another. He'd lost an old friend and he'd gained a new lover. 

"So what do we do now?" 

"I can think of a few things," Bucky said, his smile spreading, making Steve's cheeks redden just a touch at the unspoken implication, mind darting to fantasies he could stop denying. Then Bucky shrugged, pulling himself up from the bed. He stepped in, closed the distance, his hands going to rest at Steve's waist; the chill of Bucky's metal fingers over his shirt made him shiver, much to Bucky's amusement.

"I guess we find a new home," Bucky said, at last. "You and me and Natasha."

"All three of us?"

"All three of us," Bucky confirmed, with a mock-solemn nod. "She'd kill us if we didn't at least offer to take her with us."

Steve grinned as he cupped Bucky's jaw in his palms, resting his forehead down against his. Nat had understood all along; he'd always miss the friend he'd mourned and Bucky would always mourn the life he'd lost, but this new Bucky wasn't some broken disappointment of a consolation prize. Steve had never been so glad in his life to be proved wrong. 

Bucky's cool palm came to rest at the nape of Steve's neck. Steve's mouth met Bucky's, a brief nuzzle of a kiss that made them both smile and Steve knew they were both thinking the same thing now there were no boundaries left between them.

For the first time in a long time, in spite of all their losses, Steve felt like everything really would turn out just fine.


End file.
